Nvidia RTX 2070 GPU release date, specs, and performance

The Nvidia RTX 2070 was announced alongside its high-end RTX 2080 brethren at Gamescom in August, but we’ve had to wait until October 17 to get our hands on the mainstream Turing GPU. I guess you could make do with the monstrous RTX 2080 Ti… y’know, with your BIG pockets and oversized wallets. But if you want to harness ray tracing to augment your gaming, such as shadows and lighting, but don’t have a bathtub full of money lying around to spend on a graphics card, the RTX 2070 is likely the minimum requirement for real-time ray tracing in this generation. It seems unlikely at this point that Nvidia will fit the 2060, 2050 Ti, or 2050 GPUs with ray tracing RT Cores. The minimum performance for solid ray tracing in games is roughly 5-6 Giga Rays per second, with the Nvidia Turing-powered RTX 2070 just hitting the 6 Giga Rays per second mark, if a cheaper GPU were to release with fewer RT cores than the RTX 2070, the performance just wouldn’t be worthwhile. Equally, the volume mainstream segment is incredibly price sensitive, and might not be able to stomach the premium of extra RT Core silicon. That leaves the RTX 2070 as the king of entry-level RTX. But, if ray tracing isn’t your thing, there’s still a whole heap of performance available in traditional graphical workloads to look forward to. Early reviews are now out in the wild, and the RTX 2070 is looking to topple the GTX 1080 even in regular rendering. VITAL STATS Nvidia RTX 2070… [Read full story]